Fingerprints

The third gallery page is up.

http://thefingerprint.net/gallery/crab.html

Well, here it is.

http://www.thefingerprint.net/atecphp/index.php

I have uploaded my second gallery page. View it here.

Ok! Well I have the first page for my site created. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I am still very torn about how exactly I want my site to look. Which is fine, seeing as how I can’t purchase a decent theme until the first, or “not so broke” day. Besides, I know I’ll only come to any conclusion by actually doing it… Currently the only theme I have installed is Thematic. In any case, here is the link to the first image description page that will go in my gallery.

After giving it more thought, I’ve realized that designing a site to display my art is a bit more perplexing than I thought. It requires more focus on the broad academic term of “design” and how that interacts with the even broader definition of what falls into the “fine arts” that I want to showcase. I have set up art galleries before, spacing things out, intermingling different media, working with lighting etc., but the goal in doing this is to create a wider, uncluttered feeling space that at the very most compliments the artwork and at no point clashes with it. Each piece, unless part of a larger installation, must stand alone relatively unhindered by its surrounding lest you violate the artist’s original intent.

This creates a small problem. Since I want users to spend enough time on my site to see my artwork, whatever they see when first coming to the page must also be designed to draw the viewer in, like an advertisement at the door of the gallery. I want to design the entire site as thoroughly as one of my drawings. Since there are multiple interests that I want to cover (mainly my art and computers), i’d like them to be integrated somehow in the layout or background. I found this image, which I did not create, that accomplishes these two goals while still being very striking.

It is not quite the style I would create something in, but isn’t it lovely? All of those very organic shapes and designs on top of the geometric right angles of the circuitry accomplishes what i’m going for quite well. The points exercise in the Website owners manual showed that what I’m thinking of only generated about 7-9 points, with a big emphasis on the banner/side reel art. It seems low, but then again my site has a smaller focus than most. When looking at different themes, there were a couple that caught my eye. I will probably use the canvas theme, due to its customizability, but I liked the Abstract theme and the Mystream theme for different reasons. The abstract theme accomplishes the goal of really drawing the person in with that small piece of art, while the Mystream theme has a neat utilization of cool colors and a clever gradient of color leading into that video (though I despise the “bubble background.” I like the idea of including some texture into my background, since they can make a page look so much more alive and tangible, but I’m not sure how to fit it into what I have in my mind’s eye.

I don’t normally follow corporate blogs. There is no reason in particular that I don’t, but it may have to do that when I want a particular product or service I am pretty to the point in my pursuit of it. I don’t do a lot of blog “window shopping,” per say. However, for the purposes of this review, there is an attractive if underdeveloped blog for the Backbeat Cafe.

The Backbeat cafe is an artsy little coffee house that features live music, and rents out its space to its patrons. To begin, I’d have to say that I like the overall design of the website. It is clean and minimalistic in a way that makes it easy to navigate. It has a consistent motif that implies a blues or jazzy feel that fits well with the postmodern look of the restaurant itself. The information provided is easy to access and helpful to potential customers, complete with a menu, directions (with a google maps plugin), and event listings. In addition to live entertainment, the space can also be rented by patrons for special occasions. With that said, the blog is underdeveloped, and doesn’t really fulfill its potential or purpose. Since the creation of the website last July, there have only been eight blog posts, and the attention to each one is spotty at best. The first few have a fairly steady if infrequent pace, followed by a big gap, and then three posts in one day, and finally a trickling of posts every few months. Starting out the blogs have an appropriate subject matter; they talk about upcoming events. Though the final three are just low quality cam footage of musical performances with no real commentary nor introduction. There is a great missed opportunity here to comment on the atmosphere of the night, and really contribute to the artsy hipster flavor that they exude so well in other areas of the website. Contrast this to the blog of the Museum of Modern Art, where good, consistent attention is put into promoting and explicating the events. This attention contributes a perception of enthusiasm on the part of the establishment for what they are doing, rather than the passive approach from the Backbeat Cafe. While video blogging with a host, like that on Wine Library TV might not be the best approach for a music venue, there is still a ripe opportunity to get customer testimonials about the coffee selection and impressions of the performances from the patrons of the establishment. Unlike the rest of the sections of the Backbeat cafe, the blog seems to have no helpful purpose other than to get another link at the top of the page.

This week we spend a lot of time talking about the benefits of blogging, why people do it, and how to avoid common mistakes in the practice.

Blogging is a practice that is being adopted by a wide range of companies, not just those that operate their business on the web or cater technology savvy individuals. Paul Boag of boagworld.com attributes this to a shift in expectations from consumers. Modern consumers are perhaps a bit more cynical than they were in the past. They are certainly more learned when it comes to the companies and products that they are dealing with. Blogging allows potential buyers to engage in a multi-directional conversation with the companies which they may employ. This conversation personalizes a normally faceless brand and allows for criticism and feedback to be public, which gives a modern user (most of whom have pretty sophisticated ‘bullshit’ detectors), a sense of power. Paul Boag makes it a point to mention that traditional marketing techniques are not well suited for the web. The old method of presenting your product in as good of a light as possible is not as effective as the more realistic approach of admitting both the good and bad, and providing updates on what is being done to fix the ‘bad.’

For some, the majority of new clients come from blogging/podcasting. The simple idea of feedback from a company can create the impression in a potential customer that “these are people I can work with.” Boag came to this conclusion after having maintained his blog/podcasts for many years in supplement to his company headscape. According to him, writing for the web can be a bit different from other mediums. On the internet, attention spans are pretty short, and people just don’t spend the time carefully looking at a page. Therefore, content on the web must make accommodations for this and be structured to support ’scanability.’ To do this, the reader’s interest must be piqued very quickly by defining the subject of a piece within the first sentence or two rather than with a long drawn out introduction.

Blogging can also give supplementary credit to an author. For example, one of my favorite computer hardware sites is hardocp.com. While I normally go there to see reviews of CPUs and video cards, I frequently visit the blog to see what articles have been written. The blog further reinforces the idea that “these guys know what’s going on in tech. They are at the forefront.” Check hardocp out if you are a computer nerd. Not only are the reviews thorough if you are looking to buy new hardware, but the blogs are very topical, and even provide some insight into the workings of the tech-hardware corporations themselves.

Well, I was not able to get the doman www.fingerprints.net, but I did secure www.thefingerprint.net. I have uploaded the CSS/HTML file from last weeks assignment. See it here.

Well, this was more confusing than I thought.

Link

Fingerprints.net. That is the final choice of domain for my web page, if I have my way. Until possibly the first of March I will not have the money to buy my domain, but that doesn’t stop me from planning a few things, does it? The planning… Hmmm. Well honestly I can’t think of a singular niche to focus my page under. I don’t plan on using it as a business outlet just yet. Currently I’m not really prepared to sell anything. I suppose, realistically, the result of what I make will be much closer to a blog than I originally had in mind. I say this because there is no static focus, but rather a collection of categories I am interested in. The first category, which I mentioned somewhat earlier, has do do with my art projects. I have changed majors several times, but all had the visual arts as the focus. Most of my education in this area has to do with the Fine Arts, so in the beginning this area will have a lot of studio artwork in black and white media (charcoal, ink, graphite), but will eventually move into the digital works that I create in the ATEC program. A second category will focus on my interests, qualms, and rants regarding technology. This could range very easily from examinations of new computer hardware (CPU’s, RAM, Video Cards etc.), to reviews of the latest video games. Thirdly, there is a quirky little idea I have been thinking about. In Windows 7, there is a quirky, yet technically functional, voice recognition system. Using it you can, with a LOT of effort, control functions of your computer, and even type out documents using your voice. There is a problem though… It sucks, pretty badly too. It might occasionally pick up a correct sentence, but mostly sentences come out pretty randomly. After an hour or so of trying to use this feature I noticed that I was getting some very strange results out of this program. Sentences I spoke that came out completely wrong had some kind of weird prose going on. It was somewhat like “a thousand monkeys on typewriters might eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.” So I had an idea… I started playing some of the drunken voicemails I often get after a visit to the bar into the microphone. What emerged was… amazing. It is like a strange tech-poetry generated from the faulty algorithms of speech recognition. None of it made any sense, or had anything to do with the slurred voice-messages, yet there was a prose like beauty to the translations. Here’s just one example-

“…played in college of the district’s 8 inches the outfield or our jobs your letter chief cheek. Ignore your school and then order your way to our new men and women while you were given a poster and the two using normal region where in a room are here to worry are now up to Here are where your own career or you agree that are your new career and her the warriors and here you are in the whole…”

Yeah. It goes on like this. It’s nonsensical, the program, but somehow it writes better than me when using drunk 20-something year olds as fodder. So I thought about running a series of experiments using this and posting the results online. The layout, ideally, will be created by myself using some of the skills I’ve picked up over the years creating art. I doubt the layout will be too fancy. Probably a simple “menu-left, body right” design, at least functionally.

Here is a link to a drawing I did recently. Drawn by hand but colored in photoshop.

Some sites featuring personal galleries of different sorts…

Jdillon.net

Cinemassacre.com

Thatguywiththeglasses.com